Quantitative Environmental Assessment

3 credits · Undergraduate

This course provides students with the knowledge and quantitative tools required to design, evaluate, and interpret environmental assessment studies across terrestrial and aquatic systems. Students will learn to identify putative causes of environmental impacts, design experiments to evaluate these causes, and estimate and communicate how contaminant concentrations relate to adverse effects in soil-plant-animal systems and broader ecosystems. The course integrates approaches from environmental toxicology and soil science, covering test designs at organism, population, ecosystem, and landscape levels using examples from human health, ecological toxicology, and soil environmental quality disciplines. Students will gain understanding of how environmental assessment studies are designed, interpreted, and communicated across multiple environmental compartments.